1. Technical Field
This application generally relates to the field of Internet-based applications and, in particular, to automated configuration of the Internet-based applications through generation, change, and caching of application passwords.
2. Background Information
A software application that requires a person to log in to an account usually uses a username/password combination as the authentication mechanism. Therefore, people who have accounts for several different applications must remember several passwords. To make this task easier, people tend to use easy-to-remember passwords, variations of relatively strong passwords, and/or the same password for all of the applications. The result is that user/password combinations are stored in several server-side databases (from the different application providers), which increases the security exposure. If an account from one of the applications is compromised, then the attacker can use that user's credentials to compromise an account for another application.
As an additional problem, a user may have multiple client devices that the user uses to access the software applications, such as a laptop or desktop, a smartphone, a tablet computer, and the like. For some types of client devices in particular, it is valuable for the username and password information to be cached locally so that they may be automatically entered for the user. This is particularly useful for the user for client device types, such as smartphones, for which providing input is more cumbersome, or which tend to be used in contexts where the user is hurried and/or cannot give full attention to entering the username/password. However, when a user changes the user's username/password centrally, that change is typically not made available to the user's various client devices. Thus, users often have difficulties authenticating themselves on their various client devices after username/password changes.